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From Poe to Valéry
Author(s): T. S. Eliot
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Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Autumn, 1949), pp. 327-342
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From Poe to Valery*
T. S. ELIOT
W
HAT I
ATTEMPT
here is not a judicial estimate of Edgar
Allan Poe; I am not trying to decide his rank as a poet or to isolate his essential originality. Poe is indeed a stumbling block for
the judicial critic. If we examine his work in detail, we seem to
find in it nothing but slipshod writing, puerile thinking unsupported by wide reading or profound scholarship,haphazard experiments in various types of writing, chiefly under pressureof
financial need, without perfection in any detail. This would not
be just. But if, instead of regardinghis work analytically, we take
a distant view of it as a whole, we see a mass of unique shape and
impressivesize to which the eye constantly returns. Poe'sinfluence
is equally puzzling. In France the influence of his poetry and of
his poetic theories has been immense. In England and America
it seems almost negligible. Can we point to any poet whose style
appears to have been formed by a study of Poe? The only one
whose name immediately suggests itself is-Edward Lear. And
yet one cannot be sure that one's own writing ias not been
influencedby Poe. I can name positively certain poets whose work
has influenced me, I can name others whose work, I am sure, has
not; there may be still others of whose influence I am unaware,
but whose influence I might be brought to acknowledge; but
about Poe I shall never be sure. He wrote very few poems, and
of those few only half a dozen have had a great success: but those
few are as well known to as large a number of people, are as well
remembered by everybody, as any poems ever written. And
some of his tales have had an important influence upon authors,
and in types of writing where such influence would hardly be
expected.
*Copyright
1948, by T. S. Eliot. Published by permission of the author, the Library of
Congress, and Harcourt, Brace and Company.
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I shall here make no attempt to explain the enigma. At most,
this is a contribution to the study of his influence; and an elucidation, partial as it may be, of one cause of Poe's importance in the
light of that influence. I am trying to look at him, for a moment,
as nearly as I can, through the eyes of three French poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmeand especially Paul Valery. The sequence is itself
important. These three French poets representthe beginning, the
middle and the end of a particular tradition in poetry. Mallarme
once told a friend of mine that he came to Paris because he
wanted to know Baudelaire;that he had once seen him at a bookstall on a quai, but had not had the courage to accost him. As for
Valery, we know from the first letter to Mallarme,written when
he was hardly more than a boy, of his discipleshipof the elder
poet; and we know of his devotion to Mallarmeuntil Mallarme's
death. Here are three literary generations, representing almost
exactly a century of French poetry. Of course, these are poets
very different from each other; of course, the literary progeny
of Baudelairewas numerous and important, and there are other
lines of descent from him. But I think we can trace the development and descent of one particulartheory of the nature of poetry
through these three poets and it is a theory which takes its origin
in the theory, still more than in the practice, of Edgar Poe. And
the impressionwe get of the influence of Poe is the more impressive, because of the fact that Mallarme,and Valery in turn, did
not merely derive from Poe through Baudelaire:each of them
subjectedhimself to that influence directly, and has left convincing evidence of the value which he attached to the theory and
practice of Poe himself. Now, we all of us like to believe that we
understandour own poets better than any foreigner can do; but
I think we should be prepared to entertain the possibility that
these Frenchmen have seen something in Poe that English-speaking readershave missed.
My subject, then, is not simply Poe but Poe's effect upon three
French poets, representingthree successive generations; and my
purpose is also to approach an understandingof a peculiar attitude towards poetry, by the poets themselves, which is perhaps
FROM
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TO VALERY
329
the most interesting, possibly the most characteristic, and certainly the most originaldevelopmentof the esthetic of versemade
in that period as a whole. It is all the more worthy of examination
if, as I incline to believe, this attitude towards poetry represents
a phase which has come to an end with the death of Valery. For
our study of it should help towards the understandingof whatever it may be that our generation and the next will find to take
its place.
Before concerning myself with Poe as he appearedin the eyes
of theseFrench poets, I think it as well to presentmy own impression of his status among American and English readersand critics;
for, if I am wrong, you may have to criticise what I say of his
influence in France with my errors in mind. It does not seem to
me unfair to say that Poe has been regardedas a minor, or secondary, follower of the Romantic Movement: a successorto the
so-called "Gothic"novelistsin his fiction, and a follower of Byron
and Shelley in his verse. This however is to place him in the English tradition; and there certainly he does not belong. English
readers sometimes account for that in Poe which is outside of
any English tradition, by saying that it is American; but this
does not seem to me wholly true either, especially when we consider the other American writers of his own and an earliergeneration. There is a certain flavour of provinciality about his work,
in a sense in which Whitman is not in the least provincial: it is
the provinciality of the person who is not at home where he belongs, but cannot get to anywhereelse. Poe is a kind of displaced
European;he is attracted to Paris, to Italy and to Spain, to places
which he could endow with romantic gloom and grandeur. Although his ambit of movement hardly extended beyond the limits
of Richmond and Boston longitudinally, and neither east nor
west of these centres, he seems a wanderer with no fixed abode.
There can be few authors of such eminence who have drawn so
little from their own roots, who have been so isolated from any
surroundings.
I believe the view of Poe taken by the ordinary cultivated
English or American readeris something like this: Poe is the au-
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thor of a few, a very few short poems which enchanted him for
a time when he was a boy, and which do somehow stick in the
memory. I do not think that he re-reads these poems, unless he
turns to them in the pages of an anthology; his enjoyment of
them is rather the memory of an enjoyment which he may for a
moment recapture. They seem to him to belong to a particular
period when his interest in poetry had just awakened. Certain
images, and still more certain rhythms, abide with him. This
readeralso rememberscertain of the tales-not very many--and
holds the opinion that The Gold Bug was quite good for its time,
but that detective fiction has made great strides since then. And
he may sometimescontrast him with Whitman, having frequently
re-read Whitman, but not Poe.
As for the prose, it is recognisedthat Poe's tales had great influence upon some types of popular fiction. So far as detective
fiction is concerned, nearly everything can be traced to two
authors: Poe and Wilkie Collins. The two influences sometimes
concur, but are also responsiblefor two different types of detective. The efficient professionalpoliceman originateswith Collins,
the brilliant and eccentric amateur with Poe. Conan Doyle owes
much to Poe, and not merely to MonsieurDupin of The Murders
in the Rue Morgue. SherlockHolmes was deceiving Watson when
he told him that he had bought his Stradivariusviolin for a few
shillingsat a second-handshop in the Tottenham Court Road. He
found that violin in the ruins of the house of Usher. There is a
close similaritybetween the musicalexercisesof Holmes and those
of RoderickUsher: those wild and irregularimprovisationswhich,
although on one occasion they sent Watson off to sleep, must
have been excruciating to any ear trained to music. It seemsto me
probable that the romancesof improbableand incredible adventure of Rider Haggard found their inspirationin Poe-and Haggard himself had imitators enough. I think it equally likely that
H. G. Wells, in his early romances of scientific exploration and
invention, owed much to the stimulus of some of Poe's narratives-Gordon Pym, or A Descent into the Maelstromfor example, or The Facts in the Case of MonsieurValdemar.The compila-
FROM
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331
tion of evidence I leave to those who are interested to pursue the
enquiry. But I fear that nowadays too few readersopen She or
The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine: fewer still are
capable of being thrilled by their predecessors.
What strikes me first, as a general difference between the way
in which the French poets whom I have cited took Poe, and the
way of American and English critics of equivalent authority, is
the attitude of the former towardsPoe's oeuvre,towards his work
as a whole. Anglo-Saxon critics are, I think, more inclined to
make separate judgements of the different parts of an author's
work. We regardPoe as a man who dabbledin verse and in several
kinds of prose, without settling down to make a thoroughly good
job of any one genre. These French readers were impressedby
the variety of form of expression,becausethey found, or thought
they found, an essentialunity; while admitting, if necessary,that
much of the work is fragmentary or occasional,owing to circumstances of poverty, frailty and vicissitude, they neverthelesstake
him as an author of such seriousnessthat his work must be grasped
as a whole. This representspartly a differencebetween two kinds
of critical mind; but we must claim, for our own view, that it is
supported by our awarenessof the blemishes and imperfections
of Poe's actual writing. It is worth while to illustrate these faults,
as they strike an English-speakingreader.
Poe had, to an exceptional degree, the feeling for the incantatory element in poetry, of that which may, in the most nearly
literal sense,be called "the magic of verse."His versificationis not,
like that of the greatest masters of prosody, of the kind which
yields a richer melody, through study and long habituation,to the
maturing sensibilityof the readerreturning to it at times throughout his life. Its effect is immediate and undeveloping; it is probably much the same for the sensitive schoolboy and for the ripe
mind and cultivated ear. In this unchanging immediacy, it partakes perhaps more of the character of very good verse than of
poetry--but that is to start a hare which I have no intention of
following here, for it is, I am sure, "poetry" and not "verse."It
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has the effect of an incantation which, becauseof its very crudity,
stirs the feelings at a deep and almost primitive level. But, in his
choice of the word which has the right sound, Poe is by no means
careful that it should have also the right sense. I will give one
comparisonof uses of the same word by Poe and by Tennysonwho, of all English poets since Milton, had probably the most
accurate and fastidious appreciationof the sound of syllables.In
Poe's Ulalume-to my mind one of his most successful, as well as
typical, poems-we find the lines
It was night, in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorialyear.
Immemorial, according to the Oxford Dictionary, means: "that
is beyond memory or out of mind; ancient beyond memory or
record: extremely old." None of these meanings seems applicable
to this use of the word by Poe. The year was not beyond memory-the speakerremembersone incident in it very well; at the
conclusion he even remembersa funeral in the same place just a
year earlier.The line of Tennyson, equally well known, and justly
admired because the sound of the line responds so well to the
sound which the poet wishes to evoke, may already have come
to mind:
The moan of doves in immemorialelms.
Here immemorial,besideshaving the most felicitous sound value,
is exactly the word for trees so old that no one knows just how
old they are.
Poetry, of different kinds, may be said to range from that in
which the attention of the reader is directed primarily to the
sound, to that in which it is directed primarilyto the sense.With
the former kind, the sense may be apprehendedalmost unconsciously; with the latter kind-at these two extremes-it is the
sound, of the operation of which upon us we are unconscious.
But, with either type, sound and sense must cooperate; in even
the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of
words cannot be disregardedwith impunity.
FROM POE TO VALERY
333
An irresponsibilitytowards the meaning of words is not infrequent with Poe. The Raven is, I think, far from being Poe's best
poem; though, partly because of the analysis which the author
gives in The Philosophy of Composition, it is the best known.
In there steppeda stately Raven of the saintly days of yore,
Since there is nothing particularly saintly about the raven, if
indeed the ominous bird is not wholly the reverse, there can be
no point in referring his origin to a period of saintliness,even if
such a period can be assumedto have existed. We have just heard
the raven describedas stately; but we are told presently that he is
ungainly, an attribute hardly to be reconciled, without a good
deal of explanation, with stateliness. Several words in the poem
seem to be insertedeither merely to fill out the line to the required
measure,or for the sake of a rhyme. The bird is addressedas "no
craven" quite needlessly,except for the pressingneed of a rhyme
to "raven"-a surrenderto the exigencies of rhyme with which I
am sure Malherbewould have had no patience. And there is not
always even such schoolboy justification as this: to say that the
lamplight "gloated o'er" the sofa cushions is a freak of fancy
which, even were it relevant to have a little gloating going on
somewhere, would appear forced.
Imperfections in The Raven such as these-and one could give
others-may serve to explain why The Philosophy of Composition, the essayin which Poe professesto revealhis method in composing The Raven-has not been taken so seriously in England
or America as in France. It is difficult for us to read that essay
without reflecting, that if Poe plotted out his poem with such
calculation, he might have taken a little more pains over it: the
result hardly does credit to the method. Therefore we are likely
to draw the conclusion that Poe in analysinghis poem was practising either a hoax, or a piece of self-deception in setting down
the way in which he wanted to think that he had written it.
Hence the essayhas not been taken so seriouslyas it deserves.
Poe's other essays in poetic esthetic deserve considerationalso.
No poet, when he writes his own art poetique, should hope to do
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much more than explain, rationalise,defend or prepare the way
for his own practice: that is, for writing his own kind of poetry.
He may think that he is establishinglaws for all poetry; but what
he has to say that is worth saying has its immediaterelation to the
way in which he himself writes or wants to write: though it may
well be equally valid to his immediate juniors, and extremely
helpful to them. We are only safe in finding, in his writing about
poetry, principlesvalid for any poetry, so long as we check what
he says by the kind of poetry he writes. Poe has a remarkable
passage about the impossibility of writing a long poem-for a
long poem, he holds, is at best a seriesof short poems strung together. What we have to bear in mind is that he himself was
incapableof writing a long poem. He could conceive only a poem
which was a single simple effect: for him, the whole of a poem
had to be in one mood. Yet it is only in a poem of some length
that a variety of moods can be expressed;for a variety of moods
requiresa number of different themes or subjects, related either
in themselvesor in the mind of the poet. These parts can form a
whole which is more than the sum of the parts; a whole such that
the pleasurewe derive from the reading of any part is enhanced
by our grasp of the whole. It follows also that in a long poem
some parts may be deliberatelyplanned to be less "poetic" than
others: these passagesmay show no lustre when extracted, but
may be intended to elicit, by contrast, the significance of other
parts, and to unite them into a whole more significant than any
of the parts. A long poem may gain by the widest possiblevariations of intensity. But Poe wanted a poem to be of the first intensity throughout: it is questionable whether he could have
appreciatedthe more philosophicalpassagesin Dante's Purgatorio.
What Poe had said has proved in the past of great comfort to
other poets equally incapable of the long poem; and we must
recognize that the question of the possibility of writing a long
poem is not simply that of the strength and staying power of the
individualpoet, but may have to do with the conditionsof the age
in which he finds himself. And what Poe has to say on the subject
is illuminating, in helping us to understandthe point of view of
poets for whom the long poem is impossible.
FROM
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335
The fact that for Poe a poem had to be the expression of a
single mood-it would here be too long an excursus to try to
demonstrate that The Bells, as a deliberate exercise in several
moods, is as much a poem of one mood as any of Poe's-this fact
can better be understood as a manifestation of a more fundamental weakness. Here, what I have to say I put forward only
tentatively: but it is a view which I should like to launch in order
to see what becomes of it. My account may go to explain, also,
why the work of Poe has for many readersappealedat a particular
phase of their growth, at the period of life when they were just
emerging from childhood. That Poe had a powerful intellect is
undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted
young personbefore puberty. The forms which his lively curiosity
takes are those in which a pre-adolescent mentality delights:
wonders of nature and of mechanics and of the supernatural,
cryptograms and cyphers, puzzles and labyrinths, mechanical
chess-players and wild flights of speculation. The variety and
ardourof his curiosity delight and dazzle; yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherenceof his interests tire. There is just
that lacking which gives dignity to the mature man: a consistent
view of life. An attitude can be mature and consistent, and yet
be highly sceptical: but Poe was no sceptic. He appearsto yield
himself completely to the idea of the moment: the effect is, that
all of his ideasseem to be entertainedratherthan believed.What is
lacking is not brain power, but that maturity of intellect which
comes only with the maturing of the man as a whole, the development and coordination of his various emotions. I am not concerned with any possible psychological or pathological explanation: it is enough for my purposeto record that the work of Poe is
such as I should expect of a man of very exceptional mind and
sensibility,whose emotional developmenthas been in some respect
arrestedat an early age. His most vivid imaginativerealisationsare
the realisationof a dream: significantly, the ladies in his poems
and tales are always ladieslost, or ladiesvanishing before they can
be embraced.Even in The Haunted Palace, where the subject appears to be his own weakness of alcoholism, the disaster has no
moral significance; it is treated impersonallyas an isolated phe-
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nomenon; it has not behind it the terrific force of such lines as
those of FranSoisVillon when he speaksof his own fallen state.
Having said as much as this about Poe, I must proceed to enquire what it was that three great French poets found in his
work to admire, which we have not found. We must first take
account of the fact that none of these poets knew the English
language very well. Baudelairemust have read a certain amount
of English and Americanpoetry: he certainly borrowsfrom Gray,
and apparently from Emerson. He was never familiar with England, and there is no reasonto believe that he spoke the language
at all well. As for Mallarme,he taught English and there is convincing evidence of his imperfect knowledge, for he committed
himself to writing a kind of guide to the use of the language. An
examinationof this curious treatise,and the strangephraseswhich
he gives under the impression that they are familiar English
proverbs,should dispel any rumourof Mallarme'sEnglishscholarship. As for Valery, I never heard him speak a word of English,
even in England. I do not know what he had read in our language: Valery's second language, the influence of which is perceptible in some of his verse, was Italian.
It is certainly possible,in reading something in a language imperfectly understood, for the reader to find what is not there;
and when the readeris himself a man of genius, the foreign poem
read may, by a happy accident, elicit something important from
the depths of his own mind, which he attributesto what he reads.
And it is true that in translatingPoe's prose into French, Baudelaire effected a striking improvement: he transformed what is
often a slipshodand a shoddyEnglishproseinto admirableFrench.
Mallarme,who translated a number of Poe's poems into French
prose, effected a similar improvement: but on the other hand,
the rhythms, in which we find so much of the originality of Poe,
are lost. The evidence that the French overratedPoe because of
their imperfect knowledge of English remainsaccordingly purely
negative: we can venture no farther than saying that they were
not disturbedby weaknessesof which we are very much aware.It
does not account for their high opinion of Poe's thought, for the
FROM POE TO VALERY
337
value which they attached to his philosophicaland critical exercises. To understand that we must look elsewhere.
We must, at this point, avoid the error of assumingthat Baudelaire,Mallarme and Valery all respondedto Poe in exactly the
same way. They are great poets, and they are each very different
from the other; furthermore, they represent,as I have reminded
you, three different generations.It is with Valery that I am here
chiefly concerned. I therefore say only that Baudelaire,to judge
by his introduction to his translationof the tales and essays,was
the most concerned with the personality of the man. With the
accuracy of his portrait I am not concerned: the point is that in
Poe, in his life, his isolation and his worldly failure, Baudelaire
found the prototype of le poete maudit, the poet as the outcast
of society-the type which was to realiseitself, in different ways,
in Verlaine and Rimbaud, the type of which Baudelaire saw
himself as a distinguished example. This nineteenth-century
archetype, le poete maudit, the rebel against society and against
middle-classmorality (a rebel who descends of course from the
continental myth of the figure of Byron) correspondsto a particular social situation. But, in the course of an introduction
which is primarily a sketch of the man Poe and his biography,
Baudelairelets fall one remarkindicativeof an esthetic that brings
us to Valery:
He believed [says Baudelaire], true poet that he was, that the goal of
poetry is of the same nature as its principle, and that it should have
nothing in view but itself.
"A poem does not say something-it is something": that doctrine has been held in more recent times.
The interest for Mallarme is rather in the technique of verse,
though Poe's is, as Mallarme recognises, a kind of versification
which does not lend itself to use in the French language.But when
we come to Valery, it is neither the man nor the poetry, but the
theory of poetry, that engageshis attention. In a very early letter
to Mallarme,written when he was a very young man, introducing
himself to the elder poet, he says: "I prize the theoriesof Poe, so
profound and so insidiouslylearned; I believe in the omnipotence
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of rhythm, and especially in the suggestive phrase."But I base
my opinion, not primarily upon this credo of a very young man,
but upon Valery's subsequent theory and practice. In the same
way that Valery's poetry, and his essayson the art of poetry, are
two aspectsof the sameinterest of his mind and complementeach
other, so for Valery the poetry of Poe is inseparablefrom Poe's
poetic theories.
This brings me to the point of consideringthe meaning of the
term "la poesie pure": the French phrase has a connotation of
discussionand argument which is not altogether renderedby the
term "pure poetry."
All poetry may be said to start from the emotions experienced
by human beings in their relations to themselves, to each other,
to divine beings, and to the world about them; it is therefore
concerned also with thought and action, which emotion brings
about, and out of which emotion arises.But, at however primitive
a stage of expressionand appreciation,the function of poetry can
never be simply to arousethese same emotions in the audienceof
the poet. You rememberthe account of Alexander'sfeast in the
famous ode of Dryden. If the conqueror of Asia was actually
transportedwith the violent emotions which the bard Timotheus,
by skilfully varying his music, is said to have arousedin him, then
the great Alexander was at the moment suffering from automatism induced by alcohol poisoning, and was in that state completely incapableof appreciatingmusical or poetic art. In the earliest
poetry, or in the most rudimentaryenjoyment of poetry, the attention of the listener is directed upon the subject matter; the
effect of the poetic art is felt, without the listener being wholly
conscious of this art. With the development of the consciousness
of language,there is anotherstage, at which the auditor,who may
by that time have become the reader,is awareof a double interest
in a story for its own sake, and in the way in which it is told: that
is to say, he becomes aware of style. Then we may take a delight
in discriminationbetween the ways in which different poets will
handle the same subject; an appreciationnot merely of better or
worse, but of differences between styles which are equally ad-
FROM POE TO VALERY
339
mired. At a third stage of development, the subject may recede
to the background: instead of being the purpose of the poem, it
becomessimply a necessarymeans for the realisationof the poem.
At this stage the reader or listener may become as nearly indifferent to the subject matter as the primitive listener was to the
style. A complete unconsciousnessor indifference to the style at
the beginning, or to the subject matter at the end, would however
take us outside of poetry altogether: for a complete unconsciousness of anything but subject matter would mean that for that
listener poetry had not yet appeared;a complete unconsciousness
of anything but style would mean that poetry had vanished.
This process of increasing self-consciousness-or, we may say,
of increasingconsciousnessof language-has as its theoreticalgoal
what we may call la poesie pure. I believe it to be a goal that can
never be reached, because I think that poetry is only poetry so
long as it preservessome "impurity"in this sense: that is to say, so
long as the subject matter is valued for its own sake. The Abbe
Bremond, if I have understoodhim, maintains that while the element of la poesie pure is necessary to make a poem a poem, no
poem can consist of la poesie pure solely. But what has happened
in the case of Valery is a change of attitude toward the subject
matter. We must be careful to avoid saying that the subject matter becomes "less important." It has rather a different kind of
importance: it is important as means: the end is the poem. The
subject exists for the poem, not the poem for the subject. A poem
may employ severalsubjects,combining them in a particularway;
and it may be meaningless to ask "What is the subject of the
poem?"From the union of severalsubjects there appears,not another subject, but the poem.
Here I should like to point out the differencebetween a theory
of poetry propounded by a student of esthetics, and the same
theory as held by a poet. It is one thing when it is simply an account of how the poet writes, without knowing it, and another
thing when the poet himself writes consciously according to that
theory. In affecting writing, the theory becomes a different thing
from what it was merely as an explanationof how the poet writes.
And Valery was a poet who wrote very consciously and de-
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liberatelyindeed: perhaps,at his best, not wholly under the guidance of theory; but his theorising certainly affected the kind of
poetry that he wrote. He was the most self-consciousof all poets.
To the extreme self-consciousnessof Valery must be added another trait: his extreme scepticism. It might be thought that such
a man, without belief in anything which could be the subject of
poetry, would find refuge in a doctrine of "art for art's sake."
But Valery was much too sceptical to believe even in art. It is
significant, the number of times that he describessomething he
has written as an ebauche-a rough draft. He had ceased to believe in ends, and was only interestedin processes.It often seems
as if he had continued to write poetry, simply because he was
interested in the introspective observationof himself engaged in
writing it: one has only to read the severalessays-sometimes indeedmore exciting than his verse,becauseone suspectsthat he was
more excited in writing them-in which he records his observations. There is a revealing remark in Varitee V, the last of his
books of collected papers: "As for myself, who am, I confess,
much more concerned with the formation or the fabrication of
works [of art] than with the works themselves," and, a little
later in the samevolume: "In my opinion the most authentic philosophy is not in the objects of reflection, so much as in the very
act of thought and its manipulation."
Here we have, brought to their culmination by Valery, two
notions which can be traced back to Poe. There is first the doctrine, elicited from Poe by Baudelaire, which I have already
quoted: "A poem should have nothing in view but itself"; second
the notion that the composition of a poem should be as conscious
and deliberateas possible,that the poet should observe himself in
the act of composition-and this, in a mind as sceptical as Valery's, leads to the conclusion, so paradoxicallyinconsistent with
the other, that the act of composition is more interesting than
the poem which results from it.
First, there is the "purity" of Poe'spoetry. In the sensein which
we speak of "purity of language"Poe's poetry is very far from
pure, for I have commented upon Poe's carelessnessand unscru-
FROM
POE
TO VALERY
341
pulousnessin the use of words. But in the sense of la poesie pure,
that kind of purity came easily to Poe. The subject is little, the
treatment is everything. He did not have to achieve purity by
a process of purification, for his material was already tenuous.
Second, there is that defect in Poe to which I alluded when I said
that he did not appearto believe, but rather to entertain, theories.
And here again, with Poe and Valery, extremes meet, the immature mind playing with ideas becauseit had not developed to the
point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas
becauseit was too sceptical to hold convictions. It is by this contrast, I think, that we can account for Valery's admiration for
Eureka-that cosmologicalfantasy which makes no deep impression upon most of us, becausewe are awareof Poe's lack of qualification in philosophy, theology or natural science, but which
Valery, after Baudelaire, esteemed highly as a "prose poem."
Finally, there is the astonishingresult of Poe's analysisof the composition of The Raven. It does not matter whether The Philosophy of Composition is a hoax, or a piece of self-deception, or a
more or less accurate record of Poe's calculations in writing the
poem; what matters is that it suggested to Valery a method and
an occupation-that of observing himself write. Of course, a
greater than Poe had already studied the poetic process. In the
BiographiaLiterariaColeridge is concerned primarily, of course,
with the poetry of Wordsworth; and he did not pursue his philosophicalenquiriesconcurrently with the writing of his poetry; but
he does anticipate the question which fascinated Valery: "What
am I doing when I write a poem?" Yet Poe's Philosophyof Composition is a mise au point of the question which gives it capital
importance in relation to this process which ends with Valery.
For the penetration of the poetic by the introspective critical activity is carried to the limit by Valery, the limit at which the
latter begins to destroy the former. M. Louis Bolle, in his admirable study of this poet, observes pertinently: "This intellectual
narcissismis not alien to the poet, even though he does not explain
the whole of his work: 'why not conceive as a work of art the
production of a work of art?'"
342
THE
HUDSON
REVIEW
Now, as I think I have already hinted, I believe that the art
poetique of which we find the germ in Poe, and which bore fruit
in the work of Valery, has gone as far as it can go. I do not believe
that this esthetic can be of any help to later poets. What will take
its place I do not know. An esthetic which merely contradicted
it would not do. To insist on the all-importanceof subject-matter, to insist that the poet should be spontaneousand irreflective,
that he should depend upon inspiration and neglect technique,
would be a lapse from what is in any case a highly civilised attitude to a barbarousone. We shouldhave to have an esthetic which
somehow comprehendedand transcendedthat of Poe and Valery.
This questiondoes not greatly exercisemy mind, since I think that
the poet's theoriesshould ariseout of his practice rather than his
practice out of his theories.But I recognise first that within this
tradition from Poe to Valery are some of those modern poems
which I most admireand enjoy; second, I think that the tradition
itself representsthe most interesting development of poetic consciousnessanywhere in that same hundred years; and finally I
value this exploration of certain poetic possibilitiesfor its own
sake, as we believe that all possibilitiesshould be explored. And
I find that by trying to look at Poe through the eyes of Baudelaire,
Mallarmeand most of all Valery, I become more thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance of his work as a
whole. And, as for the future: it is a tenable hypothesisthat this
advance of self-consciousness,the extreme awarenessof and concern for language which we find in Valery, is something which
must ultimately breakdown, owing to an increasingstrain against
which the human mind and nerves will rebel; just as, it may be
maintained, the indefinite elaborationof scientific discovery and
invention, and of political and social machinery, may reach a
point at which there will be an irresistiblerevulsion of humanity
and a readinessto accept the most primitive hardshipsrather than
carry any longer the burden of modern civilisation. Upon that I
hold no fixed opinion: I leave it to your consideration.